2023 in Review: Top Ten Albums

stealing and editing images from google that make very little sense for the albums in this blog post

There is, of course, the usual caveats. Primarily, that this list is the work of one man, and only serves to explain the music that that one man liked in 2023, as seen through the lens of the music format he most reveres (the album). I try not to use the word "best" because who the fuck am I to say what is better than anything else? These are just my preferences, that's all.

Another concern is that this is list is going to seem too "samey" to the majority of music blog Top Ten lists you'll find on the internet over the next month. The heavy hitters are all here, and that's for a reason—good music is good music, and good music is going to find its way to many ears throughout the course of the year because it is good music. Plus, I more or less get all my music suggestions from music blogs anyway (primarily Stereogum and r/indieheads, but occasionally others), and so of course my "favorites" are just going to act as a reshuffling of those suggestions, as opposed to something cut from whole cloth.

Questions of "well is it worth it?" have long ago been brought up and dismissed. I can say it's not worth it and then next year I'll find myself in this very same space pulling the same bullshit I always do, like an indie rock moth to the blogging flame. But I would be lying if I said I wasn't tired of it. I am... kind of. I can't imagine my life without keeping up with new music. At the same time, though, I'm looking at the list of 2023 albums I consumed and appreciated this year, and I think maybe I can cut that down a little bit.

To be clear—I mean that in 2024, I would skew the ratio further toward listening to "older albums" (those released at any point before 2024). I explored 278 albums in 2023 (actually 12/1/22 through 11/30/23), and 129 of them were released in 2023. A lot of good music in those 129 albums, much of which you'll find in today's Top Ten Albums list and tomorrow's Top 25 Songs list. But there was also a lot of forgettable shit. I think I just want to make the process a little stricter, ya know? Maybe only listen to new albums from 1) artists whose stories I'm already actively invested in, and from 2) artists whom I've never heard of but whose album I've been recommended at least like three or four times. Something like that.

I think mostly I'm just tired of pretending to be a tastemaker. I am so clearly not that it's exhausting to even act like one. Most people are reading PoYB because they already listen to the music I'm writing about. Most people are reading the Top Ten Albums of 2023 list because they too have a Top Ten, and they want to compare. I'm not, like, exposing any music here. It's just something fun to do. It shouldn't act as much like a distillation of ALL the music I listened to in 2023 like it has in the past. That's fucking tiring, man.

I remember making a Top Ten Albums of 2009 list for the Collegian (the list has since been lost in the archives), and realizing, holy shit, I don't even think I listened to ten entire new albums this year (I ended up tacking on a Destroyer EP and calling it a day). But there are some days, fourteen years later, when I wonder if that wasn't maybe preferable. To listen to fewer new music but to be locked into each and every one. To eschew breadth and find some depth.

But that's just me rattling on about plans for next year. Sorry. Let's return to the task at hand. Here are my favorite albums of the year that just passed.

Honorable Mentions

20. the whaler by Home Is Where

19. Empty Country II by Empty Country

18. SCARING THE HOES by JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown

17. Cheap Grills by Sincere Engineer

16. This Is Why by Paramore

15. the record by boygenius

14. One Day by Fucked Up

13. Nothing's Gonna Stand in My Way Again by Lydia Loveless

12. GUTS by Olivia Rodrigo

11. Smalltown Stardust by King Tuff


Top Ten Favorite Albums of 2023

10. Dead Meat by the Tubs

The first discernible lyrics on the album are: "I can't believe / I'm in love with you again." Feels like a great summary of how I feel when I listen to a band like the Tubs. Here we are, again, being obsessed about some random-ass jangle pop rock band who does nothing but play the hooks loud and make you feel good while they're doing so. It's one of those albums that you don't need and probably don't want any supplementary material. Interviews or magazine features would probably only shatter the illusion that these dudes in this nondescript band are fucking immortal. That's what happens when you take the best of the old (the E Street Band) and the new (Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever), and smash 'em together to make one of the best albums of the year.

Try a song from this album: "You Don't Know How It Works"

9. Heaven knows by PinkPantheress

It's not that she doesn't look like she's having fun. It's more like she's pretty good at hiding it. But the cool smirk betrays her true feelings: PinkPantheress is having a fucking blast. This is fun disguised as calm. An icy electronic harp is gonna layer on top of the best UK garage revival song you'll ever hear from the Z generation. That's just how it goes. Watch some of her videos—nothing flashy, just a young woman doing the Minimal Mambo, holding the cards close to her chest, but still somehow also making it clear that she's making some of the most interesting pop music and she fucking knows it. Some of this reminds me of Grimes before she went off the deep end and mothered the children of the worst person on earth. But describing the music on Heaven knows like that probably does it a disservice. Grimes put on an air of intrigue; PinkPantheress is the real thing. I have absolutely no say in the future of pop music, but if it looks like this, then I'll gleefully bite my tongue.

Try a song from this album: "True Romance" or "Boy's a liar Pt. 2"

8. Jenny from Thebes by the Mountain Goats

There was a really good feature on John Darnielle last month that confirmed what I had hoped: that Darnielle was not a fan of cash-grab sequels. For most rock bands, taking a character story from your most cultishly beloved album and writing sequels to that story two decades later would turn into a craven opportunity to rest on your laurels. That is thankfully not how the great John Darnielle operates. Instead, Jenny from Thebes becomes an excuse for more intricate and poignant lyricism and yet another aesthetic change for our dear Mountain Goats. That's the thing I love most about this band, if I'm being honest—each "themed" album takes place in a whole new world, both in music and motif. YMMV, of course—maybe I love the wrestling album and only kinda like the goth album, for example—but the point being that they aren't just doing what they've already done. This is new, always. Jenny from Thebes may revisit the story of All Hail West Texas, but the sounds move in the complete opposite direction. Fuck the Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox, here's a fucking full horn section. If I were an ignorant man, I'd hope that they could stick around these sounds for at least one more album. But I know how this works.

Try a song from this album: "Murder at the 18th St. Garage"

7. Weathervanes by Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit

An artist like Jason Isbell requires full emotional investment, and maybe that's why it took me till this year to get there. Not that I didn't like Isbell's music before Weathervanes. On the contrary, he's long been my favorite artist in the new Americana movement. But something about this album feels different. I am forced to reckon with the fact that maybe it feels different because I have made some... changes... this year that we don't have to necessarily name here but that help me lock into the overall feelings of discomfort and confusion that seem to hang over all of Isbell's music like a fucking ghost. We watched the Isbell documentary this past summer, and the one scene where he and his wife Amanda Shires are talking about how Isbell is still searching for a way to relax and unwind at the end of a tough day, that shit is burned into my brain. It was scary, because my thought prior to seeing it was, well, that the fucking music was his solution. But it's not, apparently, and that adds a lot to the music itself. It turns an album like Weathervanes from an answer back into a question. If not this, then what? But maybe it's a sacrifice. Maybe Isbell isn't doing this for himself. Maybe he's doing it for me. Or is such a thought too lacking in humility?

Try a song from this album: "King of Oklahoma"

6. Rat Saw God by Wednesday

Great year for the microgenre of female-led sorta-heavy far-emo-adjacent punk-indie Midwestern rock, and as far as the critical consensus is concerned (not that we necessarily traffic in consensuses here in these lists), Wednesday seems to be coming out on top. They seem the most "real" to me, true (not that we necessarily traffic in reality here in these lists), at least as far as your so-called Midwestern aesthetic are concerned. There are no songs about glory, only pain. That pain is made literally, both vocally (see you tomorrow, "Bull Believer") and lyrically (that the story about abusing Benadryl manages to stand out on a song with such as massive fucking hook as "Chosen to Deserve" speaks volumes). I believe that music can make you feel things you've never felt before, and probably never will in a literal sense. I believe that Wednesday makes me feel their own experiences better than any other band this year.

Try a song from this album: "Chosen to Deserve"

5. Lucky for You by Bully

Maybe the breakout is never gonna materialize, I don't know. If anyone deserves to be known at this point, it's Bully's Alicia Bognanno, who has been honing her particular brand of kinda-grunge-revival for forever at this point. I don't get why this is still niche. Aren't the kids all wearing Nirvana T-shirts? What, is that just an aesthetic choice? Fucking sucks, man. Lucky for You is Bully's best work so far, and you can tell that she's swinging for the fences on this one. Every song hits fast and loud and has a monstrous hook underneath Bagnanno's relentlessly cool howl. You can even hear a little self-awareness at the end—"All This Noise" asks THE question about why our lives are so irredeemably fucked, and I can't help but think that Bully itself is included in the question. Wouldn't your life be a little better with Lucky for You in it? So why do we continue to ignore it and choose to suffer so greatly?

Try a song from this album: "Days Move Slow" or "How Will I Know"

4. Painting of My Time by Floodlights

When Puke on Your Birthday submits their votes for the annual Uproxx Critics' Poll, there is a handy list of like 1000 albums you can choose from, with the option of writing in a vote for your more obscure picks. It has become an annual reminder of how boilerplate my tastes are, and how, despite that, a few cool and unique pieces of music manage to sneak through the barriers and into my ears anyway. Painting of My Time was my only write-in album this year. Honestly, I can understand why. This is maybe not everyone's cup of tea. It's catchy as hell and musically sound, that's not what I'm saying. I think I'm saying that maybe half the people listening to this are gonna say "Well this is just a facsimile of Talking Heads," and the other half are gonna be able to see that it's Talking Heads but darker and more pessimistic, and then ask "Why would I want a darker and more pessimistic Talking Heads?" True. Maybe we don't need more pessimism in our lives. Maybe Talking Heads would hit better right now. I don't know. Could be that I'm a sadistic motherfucker. Could be that Floodlights manage to transcend the pain and speak to what it means to feel this way. I guess the general Uproxx readership will never know.

Try a song from this album: "Lessons Learnt"

3. Infinite Spring by superviolet

superviolet is the reassembled bones of the defunct and underrated indie rock band the Sidekicks. All the qualities that made Sidekicks worth your while are present here too, they just look a little different. Maybe a little softer? Steve Ciolek's voice, while definitely not the voice of a coward or pussy, has always felt like a sort of Fabergé egg, beautiful and fragile. Which makes a pretty good idea to place such a voice within the sturdy framework of some solid indie rock sounds. These are the tried and true hooks of the music you love, couching a weirdly affecting vocal performance that basically no one else is replicating these days. Vulnerable, I guess is the word I'm looking for here. Infinite Spring is for your coldest moments, as it reminds you that none of this will last, and that warmer weather is right around the corner.

Try a song from this album: "Locket" or "Wave Back"

2. The Holey Bible by Florry

I suspect that this is all an act. An indie rock band from the streets of Philadelphia putting out the crustiest, dustiest country rock album of the year, it just doesn't ring true. And yet, when has that ever been something a listener has been tasked with worrying about? Truth? Fuck out of here. That would be like going to a performance of Wicked and claiming that it didn't seem true because Idina Menzel doesn't actually have green skin. If your costume fits and the character is ably portrayed, then there's magic in a performance. The facade itself is the fucking magic! That certain art is able to get you to betray your senses and fucking believe, man. That's where I'm at with Florry. I'm told that they weren't even a country band before The Holey Bible. I don't really care. Give me a fiddle and a pedal steel guitar, I don't give a fuck where they come from. Give me Francie Medosch's best Mick-Jagger-via-"Dead Flowers" impression, I'm fucking locked in. Florry makes me believe. Florry hits their notes and makes the whole fucking thing true.

Try a song from this album: "Hot Weather"

1. Higher Lonely Power by Fireworks

A few theories behind why Higher Lonely Power hits my own personal number one this year. The first is the strongest and maybe lamest—it was released on January 1, 2023, and this is simply a matter of my being exposed to great music over the longest period of time. Maybe that's part of it, but it's not the whole story. To say that would be too dismissive of the quality of the work. And so the second theory is that there really wasn't a true #1 this year, that this list is composed almost entirely of albums that might fall around #3 on any other given year, and so Fireworks lands here for arbitrary reasons. But there's credence to that theory because the arbitrary reason usually ends up being "who is the artist that really fucking went for it this year?" If that's the question, Fireworks is undoubtedly the answer.

I didn't really snap to this fact until Song Challenge got me to check out Fireworks' first album, 2009's All I Have to Offer Is My Own Confusion, which was very much in the pop-punk space of the '00s that was otherwise occupied by your Wonder Years and Motion City Soundtracks and all that. Great music in its own right, but it shifts the perspective considerably when then going back and examining Higher Lonely Power. This shit is nothing like that. It's one thing to enjoy an album from a band you've never heard of and find something to love; it's another to understand the insane leap that a band took by making something this new, this fresh, this exciting.

I spent the year searching for a way to describe the new sounds of Fireworks without falling back on the crass description of "Arcade Fire but less rapey." I found a good one in the genre tags on RYM: "Big Music." Basically, it's any type of rock music that sounds "anthemic." You combined new wave / post-punk and heartland rock, and you get this. Lonely Higher Power is like Four Year Strong woke up one morning and realized that they were actually U2. If we're really calling it Big Music, then I can say wholeheartedly that I will always love Big Music. But it's the metamorphosis that pushes Fireworks over the top in this specific case.

It's a little pointless to pick a number-one album and then try to make the case that it's a strong or weak number one. I'm not comparing Higher Lonely Power to number ones from years past. I'm comparing it to the rest of the new music that I listened to in 2023. Looking back, I can say without regret that no other music has sounded bigger or more important to me than this album. That's all that it takes, really.

Try a song from this album: "I WANT TO START A RELIGION WITH YOU" or "FUNERAL PLANT" or "BLOOD IN THE MILK"

See you tomorrow for this year's top 25 songs.